Grabbed the 40mm square pad that's sold on amazon and installed it in my SC17 1070. Cut the pad in half, one for cpu, one for gpu. Used electrical tape to cover contacts on the gpu and cpu chips. Testing after install indicates is as good or better than the paste applied by EVGA. If you ever need to replace paste, I recommend using one of these pads; they should not degrade and are reusable. Well worth the money.
 
If you plan to do the mod, I recommend getting thin silicone cooling mat(0.5mm) and build up the surface surrounding the chip to be nearly level with the chip top surface. The graphite thermal pad has great xy conductivity and having an oversized pad that touches more of the heat sync should perform better than a pad cut to the size of the chip die.
 
Would post links but my account is too new.

It has been proven already 1000 times that thermal paste is better than any thermal pad.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the pad is going to perform better than X thermal paste, it's been clearly proven that top performance is liquid metal. The point of the thermal pad approach is not having to address the problem again. Also, thermal paste is not without detriment. It's great at wicking heat directly from a chip to whatever is mounted above in the z direction. Paste is terrible if you want to wick that heat away from the chip in the xy plane. For example, with my laptop I've found that the CPU can take much more overclock than the cooler can handle, but the GPU hits its own limit well below the thermal throttle temp. A plan I've been working on involves wicking heat from the CPU to the GPU cooler and that can't be done with thermal paste. Thermal pads, and pad is a bit of a stretch(25µm probably is better described as a sheet), have fantastic xy heat transmission properties and that gets me thinking that a pad spanning between the two dies might help with the problem I'm trying to solve. Search for Panasonic Pyrolitic Graphite Sheets - Another Geek Moment and you'll find a video demonstrating what I'm talking about.